SEALS AND PAPYRI FROM EARLY ISLAMIC EGYPT PETRA M. SIJPESTEIJN Around the year 730 CE the administrative head of the FayyŊm oasis, Nājid b. Muslim, wrote a letter on papyrus to a lower official named ‘Abd Allāh b. As‘ad. 1 In it he explained, in Arabic, that the Σadaqa, the alms taxes whose payment is one of the five duties incumbent on every Muslim, still needed to be collected from the FayyŊm’s Muslim community. After several lines of religiously inspired justification for the tax, Nājid gives some practical instructions about how it is to be handled: “Then seal what you have received with the seal which has been brought to you. And whoever amongst the tax-collectors agrees to hand over the Σadaqa according to what you have written down, give him the taxes after you have sealed the dīnārs.” Further detailed instructions follow and the letter ends with admonitions to collect the taxes promptly and with care. This letter, coming less than a hundred years after the advent of Islamic rule in Egypt (officially dateable to the fall of Alexandria in November 641 CE), provides a useful entry point into the scribal practices and know-how of Egypt’s Muslim administration, and it does so, in part, through the medium of seals. This paper will examine the kinds of evidence that seals offer us into the first two hundred years or so of Muslim rule in Egypt and the vexed and cloudy question of what the Arab conquerors brought with them, how these practices were related to indigenous traditions, and how bureaucratic custom developed as a result. Nājid’s letter usefully shows us a variety of ways in which seals were used in the Islamic period. First is the seal on the outside, which closed the letter. This has been lost, but we have a fairly good idea of what it must have looked like. Letters in the Islamic period were folded up, encircled by string and sealed with a clay seal, the name of the sender and addressee being written before and after the seal respectively. 2 The seal could be a simple piece of 1 The full letter will appear in Sijpesteijn 2012: no. 8. 2 For illustrations and an extensive description, see PERF: 145.